Bea MaddockPanoramaTerra Spiritus is the culmination of five years preparation and work by Bea Maddock. But her project is much older, drawing as it does from her youth, when riding her bicycle in the Midlands of Tasmania she found Aboriginal artefacts and ochre deposits.

Maddock was born in 1934, in Tasmania where her father was a clergyman. She studied in Hobart and later in London before returning to Australia. Her concern with the human spirit has been the foundation of her work: the self-portraits and biblical and mythological subjects are reflections of her concerns with humanity on the broadest level.

Since the 1980s her series of paintings, prints and illustrated books have as their subject the landscape, language, and loss of the Aborigines of Tasmania. These highly original works are akin to poetry.